Odd bee article – for several reasons

Check out this article on CNN today. It is about a truck tipping over and millions of bees escaping. It is remarkable (literally, worth remarking) for several reasons.

1) I am allergic to bees. The scene described is the scariest possible scene I can imagine. I’d rather have to watch 12 straight hours of Vikings metrodome “football” replays than face bees on this scale.
2) This accident was initially reported by Sacremento’s newspaper – the Bee.
3) I never thought that having the AC on might be a bad idea as the vent could suck some bees in – good new knowledge for me.
4) Steve Merchant, the Highway Patrolman quoted in the article said “there was somewhere between six (million) and 16 million of them running around out there”. Several things: a) bees don’t run; b) why did Steve Merchant give or take 10 million bees in his estimate?
5) There is a tremendous acronym used here – the CCD. I can’t wait to start using this and then look at people incredulously when they don’t know that I’m refering to the “Colony Collapse Disorder”.

2 Responses to “Odd bee article – for several reasons”

“In the United States, the honeybee, the world’s premier pollinator, experienced a dramatic 40 percent decline, from nearly six million to less than two and a half million, in the last two decades.”

First of all someone apparently can’t do math. A 40% decline from 6 million would bring you down to about 3.6 million bees so either their are now only about 3.6 million bees or it went down about 40% or 2.4 million decrease.

Second if the US bee population is somewhere around 2-3 million then they better get those 6 – 16 million bees running around because those must be the only bees left in the US.

Rich – thanks for the comment. I had some concerns re the math as well and your first point is a good one – confusing use of 40%. For the second point, I had written a criticism initially noting that there were more bees in the truck than apparently exist in the US. However, I deleted that because at the very end of the article, the author did note that apparently now, the US has resorted to importing bees. So, even though it is not clearly explained at all, it’s possible we were supposed to infer that most of the bees from that truck were imported bees.

Either way, it seems like that author had a 4 minute deadline to work with and just threw this article together. Oh well, fun article to analyze anyway, hey?